Wednesday, January 17, 2007

New location for This American Life Mp3s

Up until mid 2006, This American Life (a popular and awesome radio show on NPR) had "streaming" mp3 files of their archived shows on their website. They had struck a deal with iTunes/Audible.com to sell the shows for download - so they didn't have any great incentive to make free podcasts/.xml feeds available.

Then some enterprising Internet user created an unofficial .xml feed of their archived shows, so that you could download the "streaming" mp3 files to your ipod. It's worth noting of course, that it's almost impossible to make a mp3 file streaming only. All you can do, is make it difficult to download.

And so, for much of 2006, you could either manually download the shows from this address (http://audio.wbez.org/tal/SHOWNUMBER.mp3), which no longer works, or you could use the ultra-nifty unofficial podcast (http://www.redjar.org/radio/tal/archive/).

This American Life's lawyers (or someone there) didn't seem to like this, and sent the podcast guy a cease and desist letter. Stop it, or else. While his unofficial podcast feed went down, their directory structure/naming scheme persisted, and so savvy Internet users were still able to download all the old TAL eposides with a few issues of the "wget" command.

In October of 2006, This American Life announces that they're going to offer free podcasts of their 2 most recent shows. All the old shows will still be available for free, streaming online, or for podcast purchase from the Itunes store/Audible.com

It seemed like a happy compromise.

The only problem was, in the process of doing this, they replaced their streaming mp3 links with a sneaky flash plugin - which made is particularly difficult to figure out where the files are kept - at least by doing a "view source" in the browser...

Today, I wanted to load up my ipod (since I'm flying to New Jersey later) with the TAL episodes that I missed over Xmas... the old method of using 'wget' didn't work, so I fired up wireshark - a packet sniffer - and discovered that TAL has moved to a new directory structure..

I'm happy to share this useful tidbit of info.

This American Life episodes may now be downloaded at http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/ismymamashouse/EPISODENUMBER.mp3

wow i love you man ... great work. peeves me no end for ages that you can't go and get an older show. have an 8 hour road trip (one way) i'm making and now i can get my tal fix all the way there and back if i want!

this link has been such a boon, thank you. however, as of today (10/12/09) it doesn't seem to be working for any episodes after #243 (i started over at #1 many weeks ago and have been re-listening to every ep in consecutive order), any idea as to where the last few dozen eps have gone? thanks again--

hoping y'all are willing to donate a buck or 5 to the show before downloading all shows... they're awesome for making shows avail via free podcast, but if you appreciate the show toss a few bucks their way! its the least you can do :)

You can also use the DownThemAll addon to FF and manually enter the link to download just one episode or a range of episodes with the [x:y] batch operator in place of the single episode number where y >x and all episodes from and including x to and including y are downloaded.

go ahead and download em, but it's underfunded public radio. If you like it, kick a paltry $5 to them so they keep making them.http://services.chicagopublicmedia.org/site/Donation2?df_id=6662&6662.donation=form1

Ok, it now seems like they've changed their site and when I go to http://audio.thisamericanlife.org/jomamashouse/ismymamashouse/EPISODE.mp3, it immediately starts playing in quicktime. Firefox and IE both do this. Is there an easy way around this? I'm in windows... Thanks in advance!!

A few episodes are missing-- they took down episodes 57 and 79 because they had contributions by Stephen Glass. (They removed these not long after they removed the Mike Daisey one, 454.) But I really want to hear 57 and 79.

If you use Windows, you can use the command line program TaggerSharp to fix the MP3 tags so that the files organize correctly on your phone or MP3 player. (for example, add the "Podcast" Genre tag. Here's the line I use after the CURL.EXE line in the script:

This doesn't seem to be working as of 2015, maybe because of their shift to PRX. The files still exist somewhere, though, because the "player" on the TAL web site points to them, but I haven't been able to figure out how to get to them, even with some source digging. They're better because they omit the "hey there podcast listeners" bits Ira sometimes does and the perpertually annoying mealy-mouthed "this padcast of this amaricin laf is spansered by addible dat cam" guy. Anyone know a workaround?

As of 4/9/2015 none of the above links work anymore. Anybody know where to find older episodes? Some are not downloadable where I am from in the iTunes store and you cannot purchase directly from TAL/WBEZ.

Christopher Soghoian, Ph.D. is a Washington, DC based privacy and security researcher. He is the Principal Technologist in the Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.